“He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
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Work
Since its publication in 1988, Philip Larkin's <i>Collected Poems</i> has become essential reading on any poetry bookshelf. This new edition returns to Larkin's own deliberate ordering of his poems, presenting, in their original sequence, his four published books: <i>The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings</i> and <i>High Windows</i>. It also includes an appendix of poems that Larkin published in other places, from his juvenilia to his final years - some of which might have appeared in a late book, if he had lived. Preserving everything that he published in his lifetime, this new <i>Collected Poems</i> returns the reader to the book Larkin might have intended: it is, for the first time, Larkin's 'own' collected poems.
Quotes
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Philip Larkin
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“He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
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“After all, my erstwhile dear, My no longer cherished, Need we say it was not love, Just because it perished?”
“Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat...”
“These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing, I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant, Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting To the purpose of One Abo...”
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“Love is Not All Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love ca...”
“To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop in the oats, to air in the lung let evening come. Let it come, as it will, and don't be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening com...”
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“Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.”
“Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages Lift this little book, Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die! Search the fading letters finding Steadfast in the broken binding...”
“You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, And how, how rare and strange it is, to find In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends, (For indeed I do not love it ... you...”
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“I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn. But where The wind is westerly, Where gnarle...”
“Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts.”
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“I know I am but summer to your heart, And not the full four seasons of the year; And you must welcome from another part Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear. No gracious weight of golde...”
“On No Work of Words On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft: To take to g...”
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“And here face down beneath the sun And here upon earth's noonward height To feel the always coming on The always rising of the night”
“Always too eager for the future, we Pick up bad habits of expectancy. Something is always approaching; every day Till then we say, Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear, Sparkling armada of...”
“If seeing her an hour before her last Weak cough into all blackness I could yet Be held by chalk-white walls - The Consumptive. Belsen 1945”
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“A poem should not mean But be.”
“Go then, O my inseperable, this once more,”
“Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.”
“And all at once the heavy night Fell from my eyes and I could see, -- A drenched and dripping apple-tree, A last long line of silver rain, A sky grown clear and blue again. And as I looked a...”
“To Those Without Pity Cruel of heart, lay down my song. Your reading eyes have done me wrong. Not for you was the pen bitten, And the mind wrung, and the song written.”
“Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”
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“There is a god in whom I do not believe Yet to this god my love stretches, This god whom I do not believe in is My whole life, my life and I am his. Everything that I have of pleasure and pa...”
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“Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he's dead It must ha...”
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